Song, by Toad

I admitted in a comment yesterday that I don’t really understand my general dislike of cover versions.  I don’t object to them at all, just the opposite in fact: generally I am really interested to hear them, and I like the fact that songs exist in that sort of malleable state, unfixed by any one ‘correct’ interpretation.  The problem is not in principle, just practise; I simply tend not to like them very much, and I don’t know why.

To make matters even less logical, I love people playing folk songs, and of course the whole folk tradition is one of repeating and reinterpreting songs and phrases, tunes and riffs which have gone before.  It’s one of the fundamental assumptions of the whole medium in fact: that each generation add their own layer to the existing ones, and in turn make their contribution to the richness of the art form.

In fact, if anything makes a mockery of the current abuse of copyright law by media corporations it is folk music.  The idea that you need to incentivise people to create is just laughable.  In fact the converse is true, as the art from every repressive regime in the world shows, no matter how much you discourage people from being creative you just can’t bloody stop them.  I’m not arguing against people making money from their art, but the copyright law at the moment is increasingly becoming a straitjacket to creativity, the need for which is proven a lie by folk, which is essentially a big long chain of mashups, samples, rehashing and reworking. Read the rest of this entry »

Hmm, nothing like a really depressing news story to start the day, even one that has been in the pipeline for some time. From the Guardian:

Illegal downloaders to get warning letter in government clampdown

Ah, splendid, just what we needed. This is, I think it is fair to say, a bit of a disaster. I am not a fundamentalist freeloader though, so my opposition to this particular approach is not entirely based upon opposition to the principle itself – not entirely.

Anyone with any sense will surely agree that the idea of government essentially mandating the eavesdropping on personal communications is pretty dubious to begin with. The fact that they are mandating it without the recourse to warrants or whatever the UK equivalent of probable cause might be is downright disturbing. And amazingly, this is the least of my objections to this deal, because with the rise in encrypted torrent traffic, the spying can be overcome with relative ease, so fuck them and their snooping.  But the internet is not just about communication, it is also a marketplace, so the argument doesn’t apply entirely that neatly.

No, the bit that really, really worries me is what amounts to the outsourcing of law enforcement to unaccountable bodies. When I objected to the privatisation of healthcare and education it was on a fairly straightforward basis: these services are supposed to be run entirely for the benefit of the ‘customer’. They are crucial and their presence and their health benefits the nation as a whole, so they should fall under the umbrella of government, it’s that simple. If you want to push it further than that, I think there is something fucking sinister about introducing the profit motive to the healing process. Do you want your doctor to have his commission in mind when he decides whether to prescribe you a massive run of anti-depressants or just tell you to get a little exercise, try and take your work less seriously and spend more time with your family? Or how about when teaching your little rugrats about something contentious like, say, political history?

Well this one goes a step further. In the Iraq war one of the most appaling developments was the massive use of ‘private defence contractors’, which is an obvious euphemism for mercenaries, who were completely rogue. Not only were they not subject to the laws of the nation they had invaded, but they have also been entirely excused from having to obey the laws of the United States, the people holding their chain. It’s fucking unbelievable – they are completely and utterly unaccountable. If you want to read more about this particular disgrace, pick any of the following articles.

So how is this relevant to this particular situation? Well basically the British government is outsourcing law enforcement within the British Isles to companies who have no accountability to the electorate. ISPs have already shown excessive enthusiasm to clamp down on people who actually use their networks. This is the ultimate free lunch argument, one more often employed by insurance companies: we are happy for you to pay for a service, however if there is any chance of you actually needing to use it, then we will be very unhappy indeed. Basically, they want rid of large data transfers, like movie and music sharing, because it burdens their networks and they can no longer get away with short-changing their consumers.

Add to that the fact that major media conglomerates hate it because it is an interaction that they do not own an can be abused in a manner that costs them money, and you can see where we are heading with this. The problem is that I have no faith whatsoever in anyone’s willing to tell the difference between legitimate, legal sharing and illegal sharing, which I will happily admit is bad and needs to be dealt with. Not like this though. Increasingly, small media outlets, and even some of the bigger ones, like record labels and DIY filmmakers are using filesharing as a method of distributing their work – of trying to gain a popular foothold without having to go through the onerous process of seeking approval from more traditional media.

Are Virgin fucking Media going to bother differentiating? I would put money on the answer being no. I would also put money on them basically threatening the living daylights out of anyone who seeds multiple torrents, irrespective of content and that is a big problem. I personally anticipate an attack, not on illegal activity, but on the whole bloody kit ‘n’ caboodle. ISPs hate it because it makes them work for their money, Big Media hate it because it excludes them, and the government has just given these two odious entities carte fucking blanche to do their level best to get rid of the whole shooting match.

Basically, in the worst case, which it is not entirely unrealistic to expect, the ISPs will simply be so trigger happy at shutting down filesharers of all stripes that it gradually undermines the whole enterprise. More annoyingly, and more likely, is that large companies will simply wave about legal threats, much the same way they are starting to do on YouTube, and simply have anything turned off which they don’t like, and this is the crux of the problem. All that will be needed will be an allegation, and there will be no way to challenge it, no right of appeal, not because people don’t want to or don’t have grounds, but because very few individuals would have the courage to take on a massive corporation in court.  Basically, as far as I can see, this brings an end to the concept of due process in this area, despite how many times the RIAA have been humiliated in court, when their complaints have actually been required to cut the legal mustard.

Now that requirement will vanish. Bank charges are a classic example of unaccountable corporate entities acting outside the law with almost total impunity – it tooks years of crazy fees before enough momentum was built to finally challenge the banks in court. Their only downfall was that their greed eventually got the better of them. But with the RIAA in some cases extorting $222,000 for sharing 24 files people will, as with the banks, simply obey. Why wouldn’t you when it could cost you your house? No right of independent adjudication, no right of appeal, no capacity to resist, no due fucking process.

I am reminded of America’s laughably empty government catchphrase: “by the people, for the people”. If things like law enforcement are not in any way accountable to ‘the people’ what chance is there of their ever acting ‘for the people’?

Billy Bragg – NPWA
Calexico – The Guns of Brixton

Ruth (Chestie La Rue – what’s not to love about a name like that) from Modernaire has replied to my rambling nonsense about copyright and freebies, although she did so in a comment, so I thought I’d move it up here for your perusal:

Hello all. It’s Ruth here from Modernaire and The Moulettes. Sorry for the delay in responding but we’ve been touring and driving a lot and today is the first proper bit of time I’ve had to get something written down. I apologise for my clumsy way with words but I’m extremely tired and verging on mid-tour tonsilitis.

As Matthew explained earlier, the problem was in fact just with one song and one particular site (the Kruger website). In fact all of us love blogs and bloggers. To be honest Hannah and I aren’t particularly technically minded but we still browse blogs from time to time to find out about new and exciting things. I know that you were expecting us to come back with an adversarial response but really we completely support the use of our songs by people on the blogs. After all, it’s about the music and it virtually pointless to write about music if it can’t be simply heard. I honestly do not believe that blogs are taking money from our pockets, if anything they are helping a huge amount. So many people have discovered us through blogs and then gone on to come to gigs and buy cds. This may be a vast generalisation but I would say that the people who are interested enough in music to spend their time discussing music in fora such as these are the kind of people who go out and buy/see the music too. For small bands like us gigs are the biggest potential sources of income and without internet hype nobody would be booking bands outside their local area.

There’s one small thing that would possibly cause a little resentment but I don’t think blogs generally do this. If you were to put up a band’s songs for download without their permission I think that would be a bit cheeky. Essentially a band’s material is theirs to do what they like with but if other people want to talk about it, play it to their friends and even give it to their friends then that is fine as long as we don’t forget to support the music scene in a physical as well as a virtual manner by going to gigs and buying the music too

I just think it’s such a shame to see talented musicians, such as Hannah, wasting their potential creative time working in crap jobs to pay the bills. I could slip into a little rant now about the evils of greedy promoters (they’re the guilty ones not the music fans) but I won’t because i don’t have time, got to get ready to play the sold out Astoria this evening!

Hmm. A few things to think about there, if you ask me, as well as thanking Ruth for taking the time to write back. I really do appreciate it.

Firstly, I don’t always ask permission to post things. In fact, I rarely do. I know blogs that do but I, erm, am just too lazy I suppose. It would be a nightmare and would rub out the spontaneity of the things I write here. That’s not a justification exactly, nor an excuse, more of an admission of culpability I suppose.

Secondly, I have some doubts about the following statement: “Essentially a band’s material is theirs to do what they like with”. I know it makes sense on the face of it, but I am not sure if it’s true. Culture is a shared enterprise and, as Campfires & Battlefields has eloquently pointed out on this site before, once you release things into the world you kind of relinquish ownership and spill it into the sea of things that we share between us. I know it sounds crazy to say that someone’s artistic output is not entirely their own, but art of all kinds is an interaction, not something that is merely delivered to you and I think that once you put it out into the world you do have to surrender a degree of ownership. I am not sure how much ownership you have to surrender – I am still thinking about that one – but I don’t know if you can claim anything to be entirely ‘yours’ once you ask other people to listen to it. That doesn’t change the fact that failing to get permission to post people’s songs is not entirely okay, of course.

The most crucial point, actually, is the last one. You can make a justifiable argument for giving anything and everything away for free. Take this site for example: I give it all away. The writing, the sessions, the podcasts, all of it. Given the effort, what do I get to charge for? I really don’t know. For musicians it’s similar. They do not make money touring – don’t let anyone tell you this because it’s bollocks. Touring is an arduous and expensive business for virtually all bands, so don’t let anyone tell you it will make up for lost album sales because it won’t (touring, I mean, not just playing live, which is a different story).

So at some point, after you’ve raised all the publicity you can and received all the critical acclaim you can muster, you have to decide that some things need to be paid for, but what are they? As Ruth says, it makes sense to allow blogs to talk about things because I would agree that the word of mouth is important, and it can even be argued that it makes sense to allow some file-sharing as well, because it too spreads the word far and wide. But where does the money come from? Ultimately, if you are to avoid having great musicians sweating away at shitty jobs, they need to be paid. Money needs to be coming into the system from somewhere, and at the moment I really don’t see where that is coming from.

I think that trying to drive traffic, as Kruger have done, by trying to insist on exclusivity or trying to restrict or own dialogue as many are trying to do in the internet age, is just not the way to do it. I can see their point of view, in the same way I think I would be justified in trying to make the Toad Sessions exclusive, but I still pretty much think it’s the wrong approach. Then again, I am not paying my bills with this.

At the moment though I think the best plan is not to worry about that sort of thing: build an audience, build a fan base, get out there and get some loyal listeners and trust that somewhere, somehow, this will end up being something that will create its own opportunities. How the fuck you manage this as a band without losing all faith in the dream is beyond me though. How and when do you put your foot down and say ‘No, not this time. Now you need to put your hands in your pockets, people.’ I just don’t think anyone has a good answer to this question at the moment.

These two songs come from the brilliant Velvet Never Dries, which can be purchased from the Modernaire MySpace page here.

Modernaire – Bloodshed in the Woodshed One of my favourite songs of the year, this one.
Modernaire – Rain

And here is Hannah and Ruth’s other band, the wonderful Moulettes. Do me a favour and buy something from both bands because it’s not expensive, and I really appreciate them making their contribution to this page and being so patient with my nonsense. And, of course, they’re both fucking brilliant.

The Moulettes – Pirate Song

I got an email a couple of days ago from Ruth. You may not think you know who Ruth is, but I bet you do really: she is in two of my favourite recent discoveries, The Moulettes and Modernaire. In fact, the only reason I know about Modernaire in the first place is because they appear on the Moulettes MySpace page. Well Ruth and Hannah were so nice to me when I first wrote about The Moulettes that when something of a spat developed over the concept of ‘Internet Exclusivity’ after I was asked to take some Modernaire songs down I felt bloody awful about it. Anyhow, she emailed to say the following:

I don’t understand what you meant by internet exclusivity being a silly thing, can you explain? I didn’t know we were exclusive.

So thought I’d explain in the form of a post and give them the chance to respond as well, so we get to hear their side of it.  I might even ask a couple of other music industry folk I know to chip in, just to try and get a full picture of the dilemma facing small record labels and bands in the shifting sands that today’s record industry has become.

Well quite simply I meant two very basic things: firstly that internet exclusivity is, on a practical level, impossible; and secondly that internet exclusivity and the policing thereof is actively harmful to a band in the early stages of gaining an audience.

In terms of practicality, a label, manager or band asking a blog to take a couple of songs down is pointless.  Music piracy does not get spread far and wide by mp3 blogs to anything like the extent it does in the more efficient channels of P2P and BitTorrent.  Encrypted Torrents are massively on the increase ever since ISPs threatened to start snooping on what is essentially people’s private communication, so there is no real end in sight for this  particular problem.  And for every blog like my own that will take things down without an argument, there are a dozen who will not do so.  Once something is out there, it is out there.  Trying to stop it is utterly futile; all you end up doing is alienating the more cooperative sites and wasting massive amounts of your own time.

Why alienating?  Well because we really do think we are helping and having that thrown back in your face when you are genuinely being sincere and genuinely think that what you are doing is in the best interests of the band is depressing.  A quick look at the Hype Machine page for Modernaire will show you that they are hardly a household name at this stage, although they have had some good reaction from the mainstream press, so I was frankly amazed that anyone managing a band at this sort of embryonic stage of their career would react in that sort of a way.

Any sort of publicity at this stage of a band’s career is like oxygen – it’s crucial, and at this sort of early stage doing anything to hinder it is just crazy, if you ask me.  More than anything else at this point I would have thought that a band needs to be known and, almost as importantly, to be known of.  People need to have heard the name as much as possible and mp3 blogs and The Hype Machine can be an incredibly powerful way of achieving that.  The Hype Machine has an audience of millions and is easy to browse and search.  Because it indexes mp3s, without that mp3 you are denying access to that entire audience which, given the fact that the mp3 is almost certainly already out there on the P2P networks anyway, seems daft.

The dilemma for bands is obvious enough.  Especially if you are a newish band, there is a limited amount of material for which you can actually charge; in some cases only a couple of finished songs.  So if these are already ‘out there’ then how the hell can you hope to make any money off anything?  This is a genuine dilemma and I don’t really think anyone knows the answers at the moment.

My personal (and highly debatable) position on it is this: people buying stuff at this stage of a band’s career are collectors and fans who are actually looking to spend the money.  I think, I am fairly confident anyway, that they are very likely to buy it anyway.  There is a well-established economic model for this: they are the Early Adopters.  People actively looking to avoid spending anything will just get it from a torrent site anyway, not from a blog – I just don’t think you’re costing yourself anything by allowing that mp3 to sit on a blog page, complete with band bio, a bit of personal feedback and links to your site, your tour or your MySpace page.

It’s like radio play, just the fact that the mp3 is downloadable confuses everyone, but basically mp3 blogs are like 21st Century radio stations.  Even the big labels know nowadays that they are part of your marketing strategy and a crucial avenue for getting your music out to people.  Even at my level I get 36 000 views per month – about half the sales of the big music magazines – and it’s growing.

Licensing exists in the first place because when recorded music was invented there was outrage amongst musicians that it would kill music.  A bit like home taping.  A bit like teh internetz.  Something has always been killing music.  So licensing was invented to ensure that even when they themselves weren’t playing it, artists still benefited financially from having their music played on the radio or manufactured on record.  Should mp3 blogs pay royalties if that’s the game they want to play?  Yes, I suppose so, although blanket fees would be insane.  The vast majority of mp3 blogs are amateur and make no profit, so it would have to be a ‘percentage of income’ deal and the amount of income earned for artists would be negligible for the time being, although there’s no reason that won’t change in the future.  And bear in mind that money will overwhelmingly go to the likes of EMI and Warners, and won’t support the lesser-known bands we are trying to support, so it’s hardly a great solution.

The big problem with this situation is that at the moment the only real currency in the internet game for the likes of me is pageviews.  In forcing unworkable, restrictive conditions on bands like ‘internet exclusivity’ my guess, although I don’t claim to know, is that the label in question wants to claim audience.  It wants to drive people to their site and effectively own a crucial portion of the internet conversation about the band.  I can see their point: if they can’t necessarily guarantee money back for their investment from sales, it makes sense to think about other forms of capital they can accumulate instead.

Ultimately though, I think it’s misguided.  The internet doesn’t work well under those kind of conditions.  If I recommend someone click on a link to go to an external page where they can look around and download some mp3s they haven’t heard, the chances of them doing that are very small, compared to playing direct from the page.  People just can’t be arsed, most of the time.  The world of small music websites works best when people are more cooperative because it spreads goodwill.  Fail to spread goodwill and people slowly stop wanting to interact with you.  I’ve seen this myself: as I put more and more work into this site, I am finding less and less time to browse other people’s pages and chat about their choices.  The result: my audience may be growing, but I am getting fewer comments from other bloggers, and probably fewer links too.  To keep them onside I have to help make their enterprises better, show that I’m on their side rather than just my own, and make a contribution.

There will come a point where you have a following, a critical mass, and an established audience.  Then having anything and everything available for nothing probably does eat into what you’ll sell, to some extent.  I am not entirely convinced by that argument, but I definitely think it has some validity.  But in the early days you want to encourage the flow of chatter as much as you possibly can and I think that anything that shuts it down is just suicidal.  It’s dubious enough to state that it’s in the interests of the label, although I can see how they would think it would be, but it is categorically not in the interests of the band.

I could be wrong, but I think that’s how it works.  And for all this sounds like the rant of a selfish arse who just wants his own way, it isn’t.  I genuinely love both of these groups and I really want them to do well, I am just trying to figure out what I think the best way is to achieve that.  That’s why I want them to respond.  Their take on all this will be different, as would a label’s, and I think the best way we can find a solution to this at the moment is to try and really understand the dilemma as viewed through the eyes of the other party.  There are plenty of blogs out there slapping one another on the back and insisting that their way is the best and only way.  I don’t think that.  I have my views, of course I do, but if bands and labels and retailers and distributors want to tell me how and why I am wrong then I really want to know.  I may still disagree, but hearing each other out is going to be far more productive way of getting it straight.  And ultimately, as I said at the beginning, I want to help.  I actually do not want to be seen as a hindrance or a parasite by the music industry because I love music, and I really do want to make a positive contribution.  Most of us, especially at this level, genuinely do.

R.E.M. – What if We Give it Away
Pete Wylie – Stay Free
Sleeper – Sale of the Century